The end of an exciting year

As we are approaching the end of the year, I’d like to take a moment to look back at 2016, as well as giving an insight as to what 2017 has in store, both for Accedo and the industry.

2016 has been an exciting year from many perspectives. For the industry, the biggest change is that Over The Top (OTT) has evolved from being niche market to being truly mass market. In some markets, OTT distributed video is already more than 20% of total amount of video minutes consumed. With new customer groups entering the market, niche services suddenly have a large enough market to have traction. I believe that we will see an increasing fragmentation in video services when the market matures. At the same time, we are seeing that the market for generic movie-driven services is maturing more quickly than the overall market. The continued fragmentation of services and entry of new customer groups will make the customer engagement more important. We believe the services will evolve around new video user experiences, which better capture the needs of each customer segment.

We are already seeing that many of our customers and partners are looking to develop a much more longterm business around OTT content, rather than just looking for a quick service launch.

For Accedo, 2016 saw us get a new investor, which has provided us with the financial means to further grow the business. Of course, our recent merger with Digiflare was very significant for us, enabling us to offer a more comprehensive suite of products to our customers. We are now in a position where we can deliver a truly managed service to our customers, where we take full end-to-end responsibility for a video service. This is a great change for us and we believe we do it better than most of our competition.

Looking forward to 2017, we have numerous initiatives to allow our customers to deliver better experiences, with lower cost of ownership, better performance, and higher possibilities of improvement over time. We are continually working on product innovations and 2017 will be no exception, and I’m excited about the innovations the team are currently working on and planning.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers and partners. We are looking forward to continuing to work with you in 2017 and beyond.